Dell Enterprise updates and announcements rain in April

Texas Wildflowers by flickr user TexasEagle

As the old adage goes, April showers bring May flowers, and not only did Dell see a number of rain showers here in Texas, Dell’s Enterprise Solutions business experienced a downpour of announcements during April. In case you missed any of the news, I’ve provided a recap below:

This week Dell kicked off our Future-Ready Enterprise campaign. To explain what this means for our customers and partners, Marius Haas, Chief Commercial Officer and president of Enterprise Solutions, laid out some of the key factors that businesses need to consider today in order to build a future-ready enterprise.

Dell Networking introduced X-Series, a brand new family of smart web managed switches. The switches are designed first and foremost for ease-of-use while providing our customers enterprise features, performance, flexibility, and reliability needed in today’s fast pace business environment.

Dell Red Hat Cloud Solution with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 and Dell PowerEdge 13G servers: Dell partnered with Red Hat to announce our latest enhanced OpenStack private cloud solution. The updated solution integrates and builds upon the latest OpenStack software bits, Red Hat’s latest OpenStack Platform 6 (OSP), with Dell’s supreme 13G PowerEdge server platforms. In fact, this is our 3rd generation Dell and Red Hat joint cloud solution built with OpenStack. In a related D4E post this month, Brent Doncaster shared his view of OpenStack as a platform. See why he says OpenStack is not a product. 

IDC ranked Dell No. 1 in Total Storage Capacity Shipped for 2014: According to the industry analyst firm IDC, Dell is the No. 1 vendor by capacity shipped for the OEM-Based Disk Storage Systems Market (internal and external storage) in 2014 and the only vendor to ship more than 10 exabytes of capacity 2014[1]. Dell also had the highest year over year 1H2014 revenue growth among the top five hybrid flash storage array vendors ranked by IDC[2].

Dell PowerEdge 20^th Anniversary: Throughout the month of April, we celebrated 20 years of server business at Dell. Dell began the daunting task of designing, building and bringing servers to market in the mid-90s. In 1995, only 5% of Dell’s revenue came from servers, we had less than 4% server market share and we ranked seventh in server unit shipments. Fast forward 20 years, and Dell’s PowerEdge portfolio is growing at more than two times the pace of the industry and we currently hold the No. 2 position in the global x86 server market. To reflect on those early years, a number of original team members got together for a conversation, captured in the video below.

Dell accelerates adoption of Software Defined Storage: When it comes to SDS, Dell’s point of view is that there is no one-size-fit all solution. Dell has developed partnerships with leading vendors in key types of SDS resulting in a broad SDS portfolio. We leverage our leadership in the server market and collaborate with the R&D teams at our SDS partners to make sure their software can manage and monitor all of the underlying enterprise action *** hardware from Dell. As a result, we are able to deliver a fully validated solution that comes with global warranty and support, thus helping address the needs of organizations that would like to benefit from the latest advancements in commodity hardware or software without the risks involved in a DIY approach.

Dell extended Open Networking to new boundaries: Dell is continuing our tradition of making the latest technology affordable and available to hundreds of millions of customers by introducing the Dell Networking Z9100-ON switch – offering 32 ports of 100GbE in just 1RU and multi-rate capabilities unseen in the market till now. The Z9100-ON provides 32 ports of 100GbE, 64 ports of 40GbE, 64 ports of 50GbE, 128 ports of 10GbE, or 128 ports of 25GbE all within a single RU switch for unprecedented choice and flexibility. With 32 ports of 100GbE in a single RU, the Z9100-ON provides 100GbE at 7x higher density per RU than the Cisco Nexus 9504. Dell also introduced two additional open networking switches, the S3048-ON and the S4048-ON, providing 1/10/40GbE.

And last but not least, we announced our most powerful 13^th generation server, the PowerEdge R930. This four-socket 4U “monster of a server” is the ideal foundation for customers like Ameco Beijing who are looking to make the leap from RISC-based systems into an x86 environment.

We can’t promise flowers or pilgrims, but keep reading Dell4Enterprise to find out what enterprise news and announcements May brings.